Integrative Health Blog

Whole Foods Market has unveiled its new rating system called Responsibly Grown for fruits, vegetables and flowers. This system rates produce as “Good” “Better” or “Best”. You would think that fruits and vegetables with the “best” rating would mean just that…..the highest quality.

That was not the case, this spring, at a Whole Foods Market store in California. Organic asparagus, grown in California, carried the green “good” label while conventionally grown asparagus from Mexico received the gold “best” label in these photos below from The Cornucopia Institute article:

Mark Kastel, co-founder and Senior Farm Policy Analyst at Cornucopia asks, “Why would a customer pay three dollars more per pound for the Certified Organic asparagus when they could buy what a trusted retailer has labeled ‘Best’?”